Roger Moorhouse - The Devils' Alliance - Hitler's Pact with Stalin, 1939-1941

The following month, the 15,000 or so officers were shipped out of their camps in batches of a few hundred at a time. They all enjoyed a hearty send off in the belief that they were being released, with their fellow officers sometimes forming an honor guard through which they would pass to board the buses that would take them away. “There was not the slightest suspicion,” one eyewitness recalled, that they were “in the shadow of Lady Death.” Their journey was comparatively short, however. Taken to NKVD prisons and safe houses, they were held for a time longer while their identities were again checked. One diarist, Major Adam Solski, maintained his journal right up to that moment. “We have been brought somewhere to a forest; it looks like a summer resort,” he recorded. “Here a thorough personal search. Roubles, belt and pocket knife are taken.” It was his last entry.

Although it seems that other methods were tried, the NKVD quickly worked out the most effective technique for dealing with the prisoners. One by one they were led, arms bound behind their backs, to a cellar room with makeshift soundproofing provided by sandbags. Before the prisoner could make sense of his surroundings, he was grasped from both sides by two NKVD men, while a third approached from behind and fired a single shot into the base of his skull with a German-made pistol, the bullet generally exiting through the victim’s forehead. A skilled executioner, such as Stalin’s favorite, Vasily Blokhin, could carry out as many as 250 such executions in a single night. Working at the NKVD jail at Kalinin that spring, Blokhin wore a leather apron and gloves to prevent being sullied by his victims’ blood.

Immediately afterward, the bodies of the victims would be loaded onto trucks and driven into the nearby forests for disposal in mass graves, where they would be stacked perhaps twelve deep and limed to speed decomposition. The 7,000 or so other victims on the list were executed in NKVD prisons in Ukraine and Byelorussia. In total, at least 21,768 Polish prisoners met their end in this way, including 1 prince, 1 admiral, 12 generals, 81 colonels, 198 lieutenant colonels, 21 professors, 22 priests, 189 prison guards, 5,940 policemen—and 1 woman, Janina Lewandowska.

By such measures, and by the analogous massacres and executions carried out by the Nazis, Poland’s ruling and administrative class was effectively destroyed. In a few unfortunate families siblings divided by the war met identical fates at Soviet and Nazi hands. One such was the Wnuk family from Warsaw. Army officer Jakub Wnuk was in his mid-thirties when he was taken by the Soviets to the camp at Kozelsk and thence to Katyn, where he was murdered in April 1940. His older brother Bolesław, a former Polish member of Parliament, was arrested by the Germans in October 1939 and executed near Lublin on June 29. The latter left a farewell note: “I die for the fatherland with a smile on my lips.”

With the leadership elements thus removed and the immediate sources of possible resistance neutralized, both the Soviet and Nazi occupiers embarked on a simultaneous cleansing of Polish society, the Nazis motivated primarily by racial concerns, the Soviets mainly by class-political criteria. The German-occupied areas of Poland therefore became a vast laboratory for an extended experiment in racial reorganization. All citizens were required to register with the Nazi authorities and would be allocated to one of four categories: Reichsdeutsch (German nationals), Volksdeutsche (ethnic Germans), Nichtdeutsch (non-Germans), and Juden (Jews). One’s category dictated one’s ration allocation and where one was permitted to reside. Entire populations were sifted and sorted, expropriated and expelled. Jews were confined to the newly established ghettos in Warsaw, Łódź, and elsewhere, and Poles were often shunted out of the annexed Warthegau—to make way for the arrival of ethnic Germans, Volksdeutsche , arriving from the east—and concentrated in the General Government. By the spring of 1941, around 400,000 Poles had already been deported in this way.

The procedure was that the Nazi authorities, with the aid of local Volksdeutsche , would prepare lists of deportees, which officers of the SS or Wehrmacht then presented to the affected households. Generally given an hour to pack, deportees were each permitted to take a single suitcase containing warm clothing, food, identity documents, and up to two hundred zlotys in cash. Everything else was to be left behind. As one woman recalled, the instructions she received were very particular: “The flat must be swept, the plates and dishes washed and the keys left in the cupboards so that the Germans who were to live in my house should have no trouble.” Once ready, the deportees were loaded onto trucks to be taken to the local railway station for their onward journey. The ensuing deportation process could be brutal, with little thought given to the provision of even the most basic amenities for those arriving at their destinations. In the first large-scale deportation, for instance, carried out in December 1939, some 87,000 Poles were taken by train from the Warthegau to the neighboring General Government. With many of the deportees waiting for hours in the snow or arriving at unfinished internment camps, the number of those who perished in the process was substantial; as the laconic report of the Nazi administration admitted, “Not all the deported persons, especially the infants, arrived at the destination alive.”

Those Poles who survived the process were relegated to second-class citizenship—forbidden to use public parks and swimming pools, banned from all cultural, political, and educational activities, and required to step aside to allow Germans to pass. The slightest show of dissent—a glance or an ironic smile—could bring a death sentence. As the head of the General Government, Hans Frank, boasted to a journalist early in 1940, if he had to hang out a placard for every seven Poles shot, as was done in the German Protectorate of Bohemia, “then the forests of Poland would not suffice to produce the paper.” It is little wonder, perhaps, that the Poles created the largest and most effective underground resistance organization in Europe.

Paradoxically, at the same time that Poles were being actively “cleansed” from the Warthegau, the need for labor on the Nazi home front meant that many thousands of Poles were also taken west, into the very heart of the Reich. Some volunteered, keen to improve their lot, but most were coerced, rounded up in the streets, or press-ganged from church congregations. In one instance, a village was required to provide twenty-five laborers, but none volunteered, so German gendarmes set a few houses on fire and did not permit the inhabitants to tackle the blaze until the requisite numbers of workers had “volunteered.” The able-bodied, therefore, were just as likely to end up being deported to Berlin as to Warsaw, and by the middle of 1940, some 1.2 million Polish POWs and laborers were already working in Germany. Once there, they were subjected to harsh conditions: underfed, underpaid, and, as one of their number recalled, “treated worse than dogs.”

Jews occupied the very bottom rung of the Nazis’ racial hierarchy and were treated accordingly. In the opening days of the Polish campaign, they had been subject to the same murderous caprice as their Polish neighbors, with many falling victim to arbitrary killings. At Błonie, west of Warsaw, for instance, fifty Jews were shot on September 18; four days later, another eighty were massacred at Pułtusk, to the north of the capital.

In time, other policies developed, including the expedient of simply pushing Jews eastward, into the Soviet sector. On September 11, for instance, the head of Nazi security forces, Reinhard Heydrich, was already ordering his Einsatzgruppen to “induce” Jews to flee eastward, despite the fact that the Soviet zone had not yet even been established. German forces complied. Later that month, over 3,000 Jews were transported over the river San in southern Poland (which had been intended to mark the Nazi-Soviet demarcation line) and told to “go to Russia.” In another example, a transport of 1,000 Czech Jews was unloaded in the town of Nisko, not far from the new frontier, which had briefly been intended to serve as a Jewish “reservation.” After the fittest among them had been removed for a labor detail, the remainder were simply ordered to march east and not to return. On a single day, November 13, 1939, over 16,000 Jews were thus forced across the border at various locations. In some cases, German forces fired on groups of deportees to encourage them on their way.